Name's Greg, not Jose: Guitar maker Greg Smallman

October on Into the Music is full of string stories, shining the spotlight on five different plucked string instruments, each with its own layered culture and histories. We begin with the guitar, meeting great Australian guitar maker Greg Smallman and his friend, collaborator and customer, guitarist John Williams.

In mid-nineteenth century Spain, Antonio Torres revolutionised the structural design of the guitar and his innovations formed the basis of the modern classical guitar. Influential European luthiers who followed made their own adaptations, and in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century another revolutionary development occurred in the workshop of maker Greg Smallman.

In the late seventies, guitarist John Williams was in Australia, travelling with his treasured guitar made by the great Spanish luthier Ignacio Fleta. Aspiring guitar maker Greg Smallman met John and asked if there was any aspect of the Fleta that he thought could be improved upon. So began an enduring collaboration. For over thirty years now, John Williams has performed and recorded on Smallman guitars, as have many other leading international soloists, including the great Australian player Craig Ogden.

Greg works with his sons at the Smallman workshop in Esperance on the south coast of Western Australia. Robyn Johnston talks to Greg, in a rare interview recorded at the Playmakers instrument makers' gathering in Albany, and also meets guitarists John Williams and Craig Ogden, who demonstrate how Greg's guitars work for the music-maker.

Produced by Robyn Johnston and David Le May

This program, first broadcast in 2009, was supported by the ABC Regional Production Fund and assisted by Playmakers, a Perth International Arts Festival event

Supporting Information

Transcript

[Music: Chaconne by JS Bach played by John Williams, 4'45]

Robyn Johnston: This is Into The Music. Robyn Johnston here. And this is a 1965 recording of John Williams playing the Chaconne from the Bach Violin Partita in D minor. The guitar he's playing is one made by a renowned maker from Barcelona, Ignacio Fleta, and the Fleta was John's guitar of choice. That changed about 30 years ago when he met a young Australian guitar maker named Greg Smallman. We'll spend some time with John Williams finding out why he only plays Smallmans, and Craig Ogden will drop in for a play as well.

What Greg Smallman's done with the design of the classical guitar is seen as a significant development, characterised by a very thin top with struts crisscrossing underneath—the famous Smallman lattice brace. Greg lives in Esperance in Western Australia, and he doesn't tend to talk much, so it was a rare pleasure to have a conversation with him for Into The Music. He begins by recalling his first encounter with John Williams.

Greg Smallman: In about late 70s I showed him three guitars.

Robyn Johnston: And how did you get to show him? Did you just rock up? What did you do?

Greg Smallman: Ah, he was at a Sydney festival, so I went along to see him, made sure I waited for the right time when he came out for lunch, and said, like, try the guitars.

John Williams: I remember it very, very clearly. It was about 1978, '79, and I was in Sydney taking part in a guitar course, festival, seminar, and these two young fellows came up, introduced themselves as Greg Smallman and Pete Biffin. They had a couple of guitars which they'd sort of been collaborating on together, and they asked for a really honest opinion, and I said, 'Well, they're okay, but they're not great to be honest'. And I think it was Greg was the first to say...[laughs] to say, 'Yeah well we know, you know. Well I know anyway, and it's not too good. But what should we do?'

Greg Smallman: What I really did was I said, 'Can you teach me something about what to do?' I understood that I had three guitars that sounded different, and he played them all. He was impressed with the fact that I wanted to learn from him, and I didn't say, 'You need to play one of my guitars'. I said, 'What's going on? Which way do I go?' So he played them all and he said, 'Ah, that's the best way to go there, and that one's a little bit too far that way, and that's a little bit too far the other'.

John Williams: So we talked a bit about the guitar sound and sort of things. During that he said, 'Look you see, our problem as young guitar makers is that the guitar that you play...' which at that time I was playing a guitar by a Spanish...a great Spanish luthier Ignacio Fleta—beautiful guitar, which I'd played two of these Fleta guitars over about a period of about 20, 30 years. And Greg said, 'You know that's such a wonderful sound. I really like the sound you make on it and the instruments are so beautifully made. To be honest I can't quite see any point in trying to compete with it, you know, trying to make anything that's as good'.

Now immediately I thought this is very interesting because most instrument makers are very jealous of other makers and they're very slow to appreciate another maker, especially one that's still alive and making and competing, which Fleta was at that stage. Very soon after Greg had said that he said, 'So is there anything about the Fleta, about its sound, that you think could be improved?'

And it set me thinking. I said, 'Well actually there is. There are things that I particularly like about it that no other guitars have got, but it does have a slight...in the first string, the top string, the region which is so melodic, which is used probably most often, the Fleta could be a little bit hard and a bit percussive and a bit thin'.

Greg Smallman: And then I saw him again, probably a couple of years later, with one of my first different guitars, and he was quite impressed with that and remembered it. And then a few years later I showed him the first two lattice-braced guitars I'd ever built.

John Williams: In about I think it was 1980 when I was out with the group Sky, and Kevin Peek, you know, the guitarist from Perth who is a good mate of mine and we were both in the group, and Greg had a couple of guitars and he said, 'I've been working on the things that we talked about a couple of years ago. I'd like you to try them'. And he'd done fantastic things, such that Kevin bought one guitar and I bought the other one. So straight away I think 1980, '81, I was using it on my recordings. Since then I've... you know, he's improved things more and more over the years, and so that's continued, and in all I've probably played about five or six of his guitars.

[Music: From A Bird by John Williams played by John Williams, 1'20 Canario by Francisco Guerau played by Hopkinson Smith, 1'10]

Robyn Johnston: So John Williams, here we are in the 21st century, you're playing a modern classical guitar made in Australia by Greg Smallman, so how did we arrive at this point? How did the guitar develop, say, from the Baroque period?

John Williams: The old Baroque guitar only had five strings. Most of those were double strings, tuned in unison or octaves. Those instruments of that time speak in the way that that music needs to be heard. But, you know, all of those instruments would be absolutely useless at playing a piece of Albeniz even. It's a little bit like a Steinway piano I suppose, it's like, you know for the range of things you can do on a Steinway, you couldn't do it on an old harpsichord or a fortepiano, but the more possibilities you have the better.

John Williams: By the early 19th century the guitar had acquired six strings. It stabilised in its development at that point. So the characteristic modern—what we know as a modern guitar's tuning, was based on six strings tuned like it is now, in the late 18th, early 19th century, and a lot of the famous makers then, Guadagnini, Panormo, Lacote. People play those instruments for period music, for music of that period, and it's lovely.

John Williams: Round about the middle of the 19th century a Spanish maker called Torres developed a guitar. It's a system of...it's the shape and the system of strutting inside the guitar which gave it more volume. Now this is a contentious point, so I just have to give my own view. The real point of that was volume, but it actually created the slightly percussive sound that we have in the modern Spanish guitar, and that's in the nature of the strutting and in the nature of getting more volume, or impression of volume.

It's more like a...you know you peak more at the beginning of the sound instead of spreading the total amount of sound over a longer period, and I don't want to get too technical about it, but I would say that most of the 20th century makers followed in that tradition and made some wonderful guitars, including Fleta. Early makers in the 20s and 30s, the most well known, famous because Segovia played them, were probably Ramirez, another Spaniard, and a great German maker, Hermann Hauser. I mean I have to be honest here, and I'll probably get brickbats for it, but I never understood Ramirez guitars at all because they had no basic sound at all. I don't understand why people liked them. They had no dynamics and no tone colour, and I found them a little bit like orange boxes. They made an easy, all round sort of sound.

All the instrument makers after the Second World War in the middle 20th century have sort of followed their own different strands of developing that basic Torres pattern of the mid-19th century. And individual guitars, and makers sometimes, have been very, very nice indeed, and I have tried a lot of them, but I don't think any of them have, I would say, got away from that slight percussive, and the limitations that come from that percussive quality, although it has, let me say, its charm, it has absolute musical limitations. When you have that kind of sound you can't get the range of colour or the range of dynamic, and it's actually physics.

Every recording engineer that I've ever worked with, and others too—I know that Craig Ogden, who I know well here in England and does a lot of playing and recording—every engineer, whether you're playing on a film, you're playing with an orchestra, and other musicians, they notice immediately. They always say, 'What's that guitar? Why is it easier to record? Why does it sound better? Why is it less temperamental for the equipment?'

And it's to do with that. Until you play the instrument you don't realise that the traditional Torres design does not respond in the way that I'm enunciating words now and colouring my speech to make a point. They don't do that as responsively as Smallman does, and what he has done with the design to enable that.

Robyn Johnston: When you started to build guitars did you use a book or did you have anyone to teach you?

Greg Smallman: Yeah, AP Sharpe How to Build a Spanish Guitar. That's a very old book and quite useful, but after I'd built the first one I didn't bother with the book any more. Most of what I learnt was from looking at other guitars, and measuring them.

Robyn Johnston: Were you in a musical milieu? Did you have people around you who were playing or...?

Greg Smallman: No, no, not at all. That was just something I decided to do, and went for. I didn't think about all that. Didn't seem to need the stimulation of playing and making around me to do it. I just found it fascinating, and I could tell straight away this is for me.

Robyn Johnston: So what was fascinating about it?

Greg Smallman: What you do has an effect, that can't be defined. There aren't any rules. You can't actually read a book about how to make a good guitar, because the people who do make good ones don't write books.

Robyn Johnston: There are some rules though. I mean isn't there a traditional set of things that you do to make a classical guitar?

Greg Smallman: Only visual. I was really careful not to make them look different. Lots of guitarists can see well, but don't really hear that much. They play quite well, but they don't have an understanding of all the different sounds that they can get in a guitar.

Robyn Johnston: Do you know some guitarists who can do that? Who do listen and play well?

Greg Smallman: Ah, there are very few. John and Craig—very good. John especially.

John Williams: Guitarists generally have, in my experience, quite a limited understanding of dynamics and expression outside the limitations of the guitar, which are that it's a very quiet instrument. We don't sustain like the violin or a wind instrument. The top notes don't sustain melodically. But it's got all the benefits of being a harmonic instrument and a melodic instrument and a rhythmic instrument, and this presents enormous challenges to a maker, and I don't think all makers are quite geared to come up to that challenge, not because they're limited but because most classical guitarists are in their own world and their expectations are quite limited.

For me the really important thing about a guitar which is unique is its range of tone colour. You know it's necessary to have a wide range because that's one of the things that makes it unique and different from other instruments. So if I take a chord, for example...[plays chords]...that can be a nice sound. I can play a colour, a sharper colour...[plays chords]...very, very sweet...[plays chords]...and very, very sort of sharp...[plays chords]...and even in the context of a continuous melody it can be very important to maximise the colour in the sound, for example...[plays phrase]...so just at the beginning there you have a tune.[plays phrase]To be able to get that note very easily, feeling very sort of juicy...[plays phrase]...or if we didn't have that, we'd have something like...[plays phrase]...but if we can just stick this in very...very sort of easily because it's natural...[plays phrase]...the ease with which we can get these colours is crucial. Also the range of dynamic, in other words from loud to soft. Now these are musical things which I think are absolutely necessary. They're not just questions of taste and choice. The more range and volume and the more range of beautiful sound the better, and that's why a modern guitar should have all those things. The more it can change—that's down the string, as you move down the string you get a rounder sound—that again is part of the magic of guitar sound and what a guitar can produce. So the more of that the better. I think that sort of sums up what Greg has done with the sound, which has involved a whole lot of things to do with the construction of the instrument.

Robyn Johnston: So let's talk about the lattice brace guitar then, because is that the key design element which represents your development in the making of the classical guitar?

Greg Smallman: That's what people say is the difference. The lattice brace.

Robyn Johnston: And can you describe what that is before you just finish that thought?

Greg Smallman: Oh, it's a pattern of strutting where there are nine struts running diagonally one way and nine the other.

Robyn Johnston: And that's underneath the top?

Greg Smallman: Yes, yes, but really that's got nothing to do with it. What makes those guitars work is the fact that the tops are very light, and the only way to make them light is to have something like lattice bracing underneath to hold the light top together. Because you can see the lattice brace is different to normal, that's the way it's perceived.

Robyn Johnston: Okay, it's the element that people focus on.

Greg Smallman: Yeah, you can draw it, take a photograph of it, but you can't take a photograph of light weight.

Robyn Johnston: And why did you decide to do this, to make this top really thin?

Greg Smallman: Oh I grabbed the ordinary design and started making the top thinner. Why? What else can you do? Everybody was shifting all the struts around, from Torres' time till when I started, and that was the experimentation. But they all used the same thickness top, and that's what I did and nothing happens. You still get approximately the same thing. So I thought let's make the top thin, see what happens, and I was aware that with vibration you need to have things light if you're going to move them, so I thought let's make it lighter and see what happens. See if I can get one to break or to sound good or...

Robyn Johnston: And what happened?

Greg Smallman: The top distorts badly between all the struts, so the first thing I did was to put all the struts on diagonally, running slightly across the grain, and use more of them. And that worked quite well, but the top would distort in a strange way and tip down on the bass side, and I thought perhaps in future that'll fail. So I got the top down to 1.8 millimetres thick, and I thought, ah well, if I run some other struts in the other direction perhaps I can go thinner, so I did, and I got the top down to 1.5 millimetres using what we call lattice brace.

Robyn Johnston: And what does that do to the music, that the top is so thin?

Greg Smallman: To the...?

Robyn Johnston: To the sound. To the potential for music.

Greg Smallman: If you make the top light it can have more sound, it can have more sustain, but it really depends on how you treat your little recipe. But there's more potential there if it's light.

[Music: Seis por derecho (Joropo) by Antonio Lauro played by John Williams, 1'08]

Robyn Johnston: Are there players that you love to hear playing your guitars?

Greg Smallman: Yes. All of them. I like to listen. John Williams, of course, is really the best one.

Robyn Johnston: Who else do you like?

Greg Smallman: Craig's very good.

Robyn Johnston: Craig Ogden?

Greg Smallman: Yes.

Robyn Johnston: The Australian guitarist living in London.

Greg Smallman: Yep.

Robyn Johnston: He might be joining us shortly.

Greg Smallman: That would be good, yep.

Robyn Johnston: What do you like about the way Craig plays, while he's not here?

Greg Smallman: He doesn't muck about. He just gets in and does the job, and his rhythm is perfect, which is very uncommon in guitarists. I think because he's a percussionist as well.

[Music: Walk Dance by Miroslav Tadic played by Craig Ogden, 1'00]

Craig Ogden: Good morning.

Robyn Johnston: Good morning. Craig Ogden, we've been talking about you and talking about guitars, and Greg Smallman's just going to hop up so you can have the chair.

Craig Ogden: All right, very good.

Robyn Johnston: And I know you're a bit puffed. You've raced to get here.

Craig Ogden: I'm always late. Never, never take your family to work with you is my motto. Well it is now anyway.

Robyn Johnston: Would you like to hand Mr Ogden one of your guitars, Mr Smallman?

Greg Smallman: Yeah sure.

Craig Ogden: Lovely.

Robyn Johnston: So tell me about what you have in your hands and why it works for you.

Craig Ogden: Well it's not just me, I mean I think it would work for anyone. They're fantastically musical guitars and that is the reason for Greg's sort of personal quest, the sound he's trying to attain has a musical end. It's not just an aesthetic or an abstract concept, it's purely aimed at enabling people like me to make music more effectively.

Robyn Johnston: Can you show me what you mean?

Craig Ogden: Yeah, if you're...[plays chords]...if you're just...oh I don't know...a piece that everybody knows, Cavatina, the theme from The Deer Hunter. If you...the melody is that...[plays phrase]...and the accompaniment figure sits underneath. So trying to get that melody...[plays phrase]...to sing right through, even though you're playing the accompaniment, which will naturally cover the sound...[plays phrase]...the accompaniment will still cover that melody but you'll get more of that singing line, and it creates a stronger impression of that melody than on a guitar with less resonance. It is a terminal problem. We're not a sustaining instrument. We can't grow a melody the way you can with a wind instrument or a bowed string instrument, but it's the essence of the guitar. There's no point complaining about it. And the guitar achieves other things that a single note instrument, like a wind instrument, can't. It's really a question of appreciating the strengths and trying to minimise the weaknesses, and Greg's guitars, because they have both projection and brightness and a full resonant sound, certainly enable me to feel that I can achieve my musical ends more easily.

You know the guitar is constantly criticised for being too quiet. Everything has got louder over the last couple of centuries—you know the piano is a good case in point—and the work Greg is doing is just helping us to catch up a little bit. Which isn't to say everybody will consider this uniformly superior. Some people prefer a smaller sound, or a brighter sound, or a less resonant sound, and you do have to work harder. It's more resonant, you get more sympathetic resonance, which is when you're playing...[plays note]...one string, and you stop playing that note...[plays note]...you get a very strong harmonic left on a string that you're not playing, which means you have to stop it with one of your other fingers. So it does make at times for a busier right hand, so you're not just plucking, you're also stopping.

Robyn Johnston: So it doesn't necessarily make it easier all the time?

Craig Ogden: No. No, but the overall effect is, for me, superior.

Robyn Johnston: Can you give me a little bit more of a demonstration of how this tool helps you make a living?

Craig Ogden: Absolutely. I mean it does lyrical things beautifully, like this Piazzolla piece.[plays phrase]And it's that quality...[plays phrase]...on all through the guitar, top to bottom, it sings. But it's not...I don't want to over-emphasise that. It also does punchy stuff really well.[plays phrase]It...the immediacy of it is also there.

Robyn Johnston: Gee you're good at that!

Craig Ogden: Oh, I won't get up at nine o'clock in the morning and play things that I'm not familiar with certainly, so...but it has the whole range of things. And obviously Greg's worked closely with John Williams over the years, and John is amongst the most analytically minded musicians I've ever met. I know he's helped Greg to focus the direction he's been pushing in sound-wise, and John knows what he wants, and what he wants has validity. And this is the result. It's a guitar that has a brilliance to the sound, but also a depth and a fullness and a sheer volume and a resonance that is greater than traditionally made guitars in a Spanish style.

Greg Smallman: Some guitars are arranged so that they're really lively, and they can burn all the energy of the string quickly, so it's a very loud sound at plucking and then they die out quickly, and that's what you call percussive. Less percussive means you get less of a bump at the start and more sustain. My guitars are actually very un-percussive.

Greg Smallman: Make the middle reasonably stiff, and have enough resistance to the string moving the soundboard so the soundboard doesn't eat all the energy quickly, and that's much more musical. You can't play pretty tunes on a percussive guitar. It's click, click, click, click, click all the time. Not lyrical.

Craig Ogden: What I do love doing with it is this concept of melody and bass and accompaniment. There's lots of...there's a classic Tarrega piece and the melody is...[plays phrase]...but the accompaniment is...[plays phrase]...something like that. And so...[plays phrase]...so you have melody, accompaniment, melody, accompaniment, and you frequently hear it...[plays phrase]...so the melody seems to be...[plays phrase]...which quite patently from the music and every understanding of it, it's not. So you can really get that...[plays phrase]...to sit right over the top. There is another aspect, which is the consistency of projection throughout the dynamic range. You can play very quietly...[plays phrase]...and it still makes a clean projecting sound. And you can carry through to very loud and push the guitar quite hard...[plays notes]...and it still retains the quality of sound. Another key characteristic of this, once again, which leads to it being more musical, is there's a very strong variety of sound. So the warmest sound we have is sul tasto, which is over the fingerboard...[plays notes]...it's a very warm sound, and that progresses to a natural sound, which is over the sound hole, and then sul ponticello near the bridge is a brighter sound...[plays notes]...so we might use this for...[plays phrase]...which was the beginning of the third movement of the famous Rodrigo guitar concerto. And so you can create those paired phrases, then you get a little phrase that's repeated, a different phrase and it's repeated again, and if you play the same thing the same way all the time it gets boring very quickly. And on these instruments, on any...you can do it on any instrument, but on a Smallman the effect is more...[plays notes]...pronounced, and it just makes a stronger musical impact.

Robyn Johnston: Craig Ogden, thank you very much for rushing in to give us that wonderful demonstration. Thank you very much.

[Music: Adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo played by Craig Ogden, 1'07]

Robyn Johnston: Music from Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the BBC Philharmonic with Craig Ogden, whom we heard demonstrating his Smallman guitar. This is Into The Music on Radio National, abc.net.au/rn. Robyn Johnston here in conversation with guitar maker Greg Smallman, and spending some time with a guitarist who's been playing Smallmans for 30 years, John Williams.

What were your first impressions of Greg as a person when you met him back in the 70s?

John Williams: Well to be honest, for a lot of people he creates a bit of a strange impression because he's so quiet and he moves so quietly. He moves very, very...economical in his movements and he doesn't talk at lot, and some people find that a bit intimidating, but actually it's kind of my style of bloke, you know, and I just found him great and really interesting, and we've become really, really close friends over the years.

[Music: Sonata in E Major L.23 (excerpt) by Domenico Scarlatti transcribed by John Williams and played by John Williams, 3'04]

Greg Smallman: I left school, went to a university, couldn't cope with that...doing engineering, then I did a tech college course, like same sort of thing only a little bit easier, and then I got to be a cadet pilot with Qantas...

Robyn Johnston: Really?

Greg Smallman: ...and didn't last very long there.

Robyn Johnston: Why not?

Greg Smallman: Ah, I couldn't use the instruments properly. I hated the radio, and I hated flying off the panel. I liked to look out and see where I was going, and that's not how you fly jumbo jets for Qantas, and they got rid of me pretty quick.

Robyn Johnston: So you did engineering and did the early studies to be a pilot because you were good at science at school, is that how that happened, or were you expected to do that or...?

Greg Smallman: Yeah probab...expected, probably. And I was okay at it, not especially good. At the university, when it came to pure mathematics I went to the pub. I survived two lessons of it, and I thought this is completely ridiculous, so I'd go to the pub, and of course I failed. [Laughs]

Robyn Johnston: Did your family think that, you know, you were a drop-out and a failure and you should have stuck at it?

Greg Smallman: Yeah, all the time, yeah. [Laughs] So I got this good job selling boats, taking people out on the water. Then I went and leased a service station, got into drag racing a little bit. And then I went broke, so I went to the teachers college to try and get that proper job because things were crumbling. And then I started building guitars.

Robyn Johnston: How did you come to know about music, and how did you come to know about guitars?

Greg Smallman: Oh, I could play the piano and the trumpet. I did that when I was a kid. I liked music. When I was playing piano I couldn't read music very well, and my parents used to push the half hour piano practice, and I'd go to the piano teacher who'd whack me with the ruler. It was a long time ago. And because I couldn't read I'd make it up, and it wasn't quite right but I was quite happy with it, but no one else was, and I was quite good at making up things like that. So I liked music but I couldn't fit into it, how it was presented to me.

Robyn Johnston: And why was it important to you to innovate, to do something different? I mean other people have gone, well this is how you make a classical guitar and so I'll try and make a really good one of those.

Greg Smallman: I couldn't sell 'em. I made them as good or as bad as everyone else, and I could tell, but they really couldn't believe that I'd made one. You know they'd say things like, 'The neck's straight for a home-made one'.

Robyn Johnston: Is that because you were living in Australia and you weren't Spanish?

Greg Smallman: Mmm, self-taught, self-taught. Name was Greg, not Jose.

Robyn Johnston: Right.

Greg Smallman: And I thought, I need to do something different. So I did. And it worked.

Robyn Johnston: So if you'd been born in Spain and descended from a family with a great tradition of...

Greg Smallman: Yeah, I didn't think...when I started, in the beginning I thought, I'll just work around all this and try and refine it, do the best I can. Should be good. And after a couple of years I thought, yeah, but they don't really respond to it. And because I hadn't been taught by anybody, it was easy to innovate.

John Williams: A lot of instrument makers make beautifully, sometimes really great instruments, but very often they don't know why. This is very interesting. I've talked to a couple of violin experts, repair people, you know, people who are very up on the best violins from Stradivarius' day to the present, and they say the same thing as I'm saying now. A tradition, you know, is found to work, and they repeat that tradition, and they refine in ways that they're not always fully analytical about, and they get a feel for it and then the tradition carries on, and I think that is probably one of the problems with guitar making. It gets very complicated, but I like to analyse it because I'm interested in things, you know. I don't start off from the analysis, I want to know why it is that something sounds better. So it starts off with my ears. It sounds better, it feels better. Why?

Greg Smallman: John Williams, of course, doesn't make excuses for how hard it is to play the guitar, like Segovia, and if the rhythm should be like...completely driving in a dance music, he doesn't slow down because it's difficult.

Robyn Johnston: So you reckon Segovia was fudging it?

Greg Smallman: Yeah, yeah. And as a non-guitar player I can say that.

Robyn Johnston: Right, and also he's no longer with us. [Laughs]

Greg Smallman: Yes, yes. Well what he did, he played slow in the tricky bits and fast in the easy bits, and it became a way...they called it interpretation, and people started copying him. They walk like him, they talk like him, and they played like him. They'd listened to the CDs and slow down because, oh, it's getting difficult. And then instead of making a crescendo he'd die down. Like when it was musically sensible to keep increasing, he'd die down because he'd run out of steam half way up. But, he got everybody involved in the guitar, and he was fantastic. But people shouldn't try and copy him.

Robyn Johnston: Something Greg says about you is that you don't make excuses for how difficult it is to play the guitar.

John Williams: Oh don't I? I probably...[Laughs]...probably being very careful... No, I think he may mean that I don't think the guitar should, as it were, plead a special case. There are a lot of interpretive—and I don't mean just classical interpretation, but ways of playing rhythm, ways of expressing or interpreting a melody, which have become kind of a part of the guitar's way of expressing things. For example, there are little...they may be very charming, and I don't mean to denigrate the great Segovia or to criticise him as a great artist and a great guitarist—part of guitar history—but just purely musically, take one example, in the middle of a piece called Sevilla by Albeniz there's a bit that goes...[plays phrase]...that. Now Segovia would play this in his own amazingly charming way like this.[plays phrase]You hear that little stop between...before the last note?[plays phrase]And he used to play that last note beautifully, you know with a little vibrato, and everyone would swoon, but it's a kind of affectation really. I mean it's not...no violinist or pianist or anyone would dream of doing that sort of thing, because the melody doesn't do that.[plays phrase]You can wait and express it, but not with that...[plays phrase]...that stop. And that comes from not wanting to, in a way, take the chance of jumping up the string. You know when you're going up you take a chance. You've got to find the next note.

Robyn Johnston: So the interpretation of the music is being driven by the technical challenges of the instrument rather than driven by what the music actually wants you to do.

John Williams: Exactly. That's perfectly put, and it happens in rhythm too. You know for instance you've got in Asturias...[plays phrase]...and it goes on. You go...[plays phrase]...oh sorry...[plays phrase]...etcetera. Now it has to be in time. All those chords have to be in time.[plays phrase]To be limited by the change, the technical difficulties, right and left hand, you could end up by playing...[plays phrase]In other words you play the chord and then you wait while you get the rest of the notes. And these things have become often quite ingrained in guitar playing. Not everyone does it, but you know that Segovia influence, I'd have to say, was strong in that regard. Another example would be Sevilla. Because it's a dance I'd think it's the most important example is that, you know...[plays phrase]...this is not the proper flamenco sound, but it's the basic rhythm of a flamenco, of a Sevillanas.[plays phrase]That's what's danced to.[plays phrase]So it's the same rhythm and that's as it's danced. Now when I say you can't, and you shouldn't play that like this...[plays phrase]There I'm bringing out the melody and it sounds very nice and all that, but there's no rhythm in that.

Robyn Johnston: Can't dance to it.

John Williams: You can't dance to it. You know, I mean no one dances and keeps their foot in the air while they wait for the...[Laughs] for the guitarist to play the next chord. So again this is a common thing, and I'm relentless...you know if Greg says I don't compromise, I really am, and I spent ages trying to.... there's a difficult bit in that piece...[plays phrase]...where we do this...[plays phrase]...you've got to go up the top again, and I had to work out a way of re-fingering it so that I could get...use an open string to get up the top...[plays phrase]...otherwise you get...[plays phrase]...you get a stop before you get up to the top. So things like that, yeah, I just don't compromise with, and I don't think one should. The trouble is that I'm fully aware that I'm...and I have been throughout my life, quite often criticised for being, you know, a little bit relentless with the rhythm and not expressive enough as...or whatever the euphemism might be. But I take it as a compliment really, you know, it's simply a question of understanding the piece of music. A Sevillanas, that piece, Sevilla, is a dance, and that's the dance, and it is relentless. Absolutely. But when you come to the middle section...[plays phrase]...that's the poetry, and you know, it's the contrast between the two.

[Music: Sevilla (Sevillanas) from Suite Espanola, Op. 47 by Isaac Albeniz, arr. John Williams and played by John Williams, 0'45]

Robyn Johnston: What are some of the other things you're aiming for in terms of making your guitars more musical?

Greg Smallman: Always fuller. It's impossible to make them too full. It's really important to have the bottom of each note sounding very strong. The note's made up of the fundamental first overtone, second, third, forth, up to about ten. A piano doesn't have much of it. Some of the big ones are all right in the middle, but the piano's dosed with many overtones that are probably inharmonic as well. Don't like the piano very much.

Robyn Johnston: Why don't you like the piano?

Greg Smallman: Because the teacher whacked my hand when I learned it. [Laughs] I can't even stand the smell of them!

Robyn Johnston: Do you like the smell of your guitars?

Greg Smallman: No, not particularly, no. Building guitars actually is a really dirty job, and it's pretty hazardous. You have to wear masks and gloves and...

Robyn Johnston: Are you a very wood person?

Greg Smallman: No, no, no, I hate wood. It's too dusty!

[Music: Adagio Prelude from Lute Suite No. 4 in E major, BWV 1006a by Johann Sebastian Bach, arr. John Williams and played by John Williams, 1'33]

Robyn Johnston: If you could have your ideal guitar, what would it have that the guitars you have now don't have?

John Williams: Well in all honesty...it sounds a ridiculously over the top thing to say, I'd probably say nothing. I mean the only thing would be—and Greg knows this well so I'm not being indiscreet towards Greg—is what he refers to as 'those problem notes', which for the player and the maker are just not a hundred per cent perfect. It would be very nice if you could get an instrument where there were no problem notes, and that would be the only...the only thing, you know. So in a way I suppose we have to be grateful for that little problem that keeps us interested instead of settling back and thinking, well, that's it, you know.

Greg Smallman: That's a C sharp. Much more important. More likely to be used.

Robyn Johnston: You can't have everything?

Greg Smallman: No, no. [Laughs] It's all a bit of a compromise, but you've actually got to make the guitar lively enough so these short notes are starting to become a nuisance. If there are no bad notes there are no good ones. It means the guitar isn't accepting the energy of the string at all, and not showing any shortness of notes, but it's not sounding good at the same time.

Robyn Johnston: So because it's got to be alive and responsive, some things have to work not quite as perfectly as they would, because if you fixed that you would destroy something that's more important?

Greg Smallman: Yes.

[Music: Notes in the Margin composed by John Williams and played by John Williams, 2'24]

John Williams: It's really important that the mechanics, you know, the details, the analysis of how sound is produced is really important. You know, upper harmonic partials are what give a note character, so to understand what is going on that's making that different sound, and there are real physical ways of doing that with a guitar. It's, you know, how much does the top weigh, what's the strutting made of, how thick is it near the bridge, how thick is it near the edge of the...all those things are physical things, and understanding those dynamics, you've got to start off there.

He doesn't want to change for change's sake. I mean he just wants to find little areas of improvement where he can, but I mean over the years he's done some pretty extraordinary things, but they've been experiments of finding out how things work. I mean he once came down to Melbourne with a guitar which was...the top was entirely carbon fibre, and it was kept on to a sort of temporary plywood back and sides with a whole series of elastic bands. [Laughs] But that's because he wanted to see how a certain facet of the development, you know, worked. He didn't obviously expect me to do a concert on that instrument. But so I think his overall talent (or) contribution is to combine, obviously what's a bit of his own magic, but with a real understanding of how the guitar works.

I've been writing little pieces—I don't call myself a composer—but I've been writing a lot of little pieces in the last two or three years. It's amazing actually what a rewarding challenge that is, because I write little things which are really guitaristic. They're not great compositions, but they're guitaristic, and I can use the sound of the Smallman a lot in ways that probably on another instrument wouldn't...for instance the richness in the bass, and for instance one of my pieces...[plays phrase]...you need the richness there.[plays phrase]So the sound of an instrument can be a challenge which you can use, you know, which is very rewarding.

Robyn Johnston: So the maker then is influencing the composer really, because the little tunes, as you call them, that you're writing, you're writing on that guitar and are arising out of its capacities in a way?

John Williams: Yes I think that's true. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

[Music: Song without Words composed by John Williams and played by John Williams, 3'05]

Robyn Johnston: Are you a fairly even-tempered creative kind of person?

Greg Smallman: Ah, probably. I get grumpy, but I'm probably not really a grumpy guitar maker.

Robyn Johnston: And what do you think when you wake up in the morning in your coastal splendour in Esperance on the south coast of WA and you're going to go to work, what do you think?

Greg Smallman: Ah, I wonder what we did yesterday. Will that be any good? Has the glue gone off yet? Can I string it up? What will it sound like? And that's exciting. Because you never really know, it might be good, it might be bad. If it's bad, oh damn, but then that pushes you to try the opposite or try again.

Robyn Johnston: You've got to head east for several hours to get home to Esperance, and you want to get there before the kangaroos come out at dusk, so we'll let you go on your journey. Greg Smallman, it's been lovely to meet you and thank you very much for spending the time with us on Into The Music.